Do you ever feel stuck on a problem and don’t know where to begin? Maybe you’re not hitting revenue numbers or your incidence rates for accidents are going up. It can be overwhelming and stressful to miss targets or feel lost when it comes to business performance problems. No matter the problem, data can help. To be honest, with the data available to you it would be a mistake not to use it to inform your business decisions.

Increase Revenue

You can add revenue to your organization by upselling services, increasing hours, acquiring new customers, and retaining the customers you have. To upsell services or increasing hours, the best way to start is by having a clear picture of what is happening today. With data insights, you can quickly identify when a senior’s needs have changed and offer the right services at the right time. You will know when a senior’s needs have become more intensive and that it’s time to offer additional hours. Viewing data at the summary level can help you identify gaps in your service offerings so you don’t miss revenue opportunities.

Data can help you grow your business with new families. You can use summary-level data to show clients how your organization has improved the health and wellbeing of seniors in your care. You can also show them how you use data to offer personalized care and customized recommendations. This same information can be shared with your referral network so other providers feel confident referring families to your services.

The same rich information that will help you grow your business will also help you retain the seniors in your care. Using data enables personalized care offerings by providing a clear picture of the current health, wellbeing, and needs for each senior in your care. You can identify which seniors are a flight risk because they are unhappy, a high hospitalization risk, or at risk for needing institutional care. With these insights, you can take preventive measures to improve quality of life and independence—which will increase satisfaction and help them continue to age in place, while also protecting your revenue stream. Also, when you share your measurements and personalized tracking with seniors and families they can see the care team’s impact on the senior’s quality of life—and keeping them informed also helps them to feel empowered. With an organization using data to provide the best possible care while also keeping them informed, they will want to stay.

Manage Risk

Senior care organizations aim to keep seniors healthy and safe because that is their mission. Yet accidents, hospitalizations, illnesses—these are all part of running a senior care organization. It is also part of running a senior care organization to work towards minimizing these risks.

Data can help you get a handle on what types of accidents or other risks are happening most frequently. Without data insights, you may notice accidents going up and want to fix it, but where do you start? With data insights, you can identify which seniors and care teams have higher incidence rates, and identify what types of risks and accidents are occurring and how frequently. You can look at the data from different angles for root cause analysis—what is the true problem causing more accidents?

Even better, data enables predictive analytics so you can catch a trend in the wrong direction before it gets bad. With senior care, certain risks are expected and normal. So without qualitative data, it can be hard to spot a trend early. With numbers and data-based graphs you be proactive.

Empower Staff

Your caregivers and staff are your biggest assets when it comes to business performance—they are your service offering. Any effort spent on empowering your staff to better do their jobs is usually money well-spent—if you do it smartly. Data enables you to do it smartly.

For one, caregivers are more effective when they have the information needed to do their jobs well. When key data is accessible by them, they can stay up-to-date on each senior in their care. Also, data can help inform them of the results of their contributions. When you collect consistent data on seniors, caregivers can link their efforts to results. They can also see the impact of any changes you make that affect their jobs.

Effective—and fair—performance reviews are also key to maintaining a high-quality and empowered staff. With reliable data, you can provide actionable feedback to caregivers that is based on the same measures applied to every other caregiver. The importance of this type of fairness in managing staff is often overlooked—but it’s critical. Sometimes our best caregivers fall under the radar because they don’t need as much oversight. Sometimes our problem caregivers avoid accountability. With data-driven performance reviews, you can provide quantifiable and effective reviews. You’ll be more likely to praise your rock stars and give constructive criticism where it’s needed. With clear points of improvement, caregivers are more able to act on that feedback and grow in their abilities.

If data can help you solve these problems, why isn’t everyone doing it? Most likely because senior care organizations have limited resources and the last thing they have time for is integrating data management and analytics into their operations. That’s why it’s best to partner with a data technology provider who can help.

SeniorGrowth is a technology provider that analyzes your senior data to help you improve business performance. Our SeniorInsights tool includes data analytics and insights that lead to smarter decisions and empower seniors to live the fullest and most independent life possible. Our platform also provides customized recommendations in the form of a Life Planner to address each senior’s situation, risks, and present quality of life. And perhaps most importantly, our platform makes it easy to share information within your organization or with seniors and families because it’s online and mobile.

We invite you to try SeniorGrowth for free for 14 days. Let us show you the power that lies in your data.

Want to tweet with us about how to use data to improve business performance? Find us on Twitter @SeniorGrowth with #DataInSeniorCare.